Donne e Fauciulli, Studi di vita sociale. Con Lettera-prefazione di Roma: Enrico Voghera, The author is a distinguished Italian magistrate who has been honored in France by the cross of the Legion of Honor. He has written many books and articles, chiefly on problems of criminal and social psychology, and in this which, he thinks, is probably his last work, he sums up his thought on the subjects discussed, and the general results of his thirty years' labor for the regeneration of women and children. Among the subjects treated are the following: the use of tobacco by children, the sexual life of the child, juvenile vagabondage, the curiosity of children, injurious sport, stammering, the child's conception of the school, coeducation, the vanity of children, and the sentiments of solidarity and responsibility as manifested among them. The last chapter is devoted to maternal education in the different classes of society. In assembling material for these studies the author has made frequent use of the questionnaire, and has utilized the investigations of a large number of European students of juvenile delinquency and child psychology. More than two hundred authors are named in the index-only one American, Bellamy! The book is informative, interesting, apparently written with unusual sincerity of purpose, but the studies are too cursory to possess much more than a popular value. I. W. H. The Village Labourer, 1762-1832. A Study in the Government of England before the Reform Bill. By J. L. HAMMOND and BARBARA HAMMOND. Longmans, Green & Company, 1911. 8vo, pp. x+418. $3.00 net. This volume is the first in a study of the life of the poor during a significant period of English history, the industrial revolution. The present book deals with the agricultural laborer, while a proposed second volume will treat of the town workers during the same period. The most important series of events in this epoch for the village laborers were in connection with the inclosure movement. The authors have given a realistic description of the village before inclosure, and have made a careful analysis of the actual procedure and stages by which the old village was destroyed. The two chapters on this topic are supplemented by a valuable appendix containing the details of the parliamentary proceedings in certain actual cases of inclosure. The economic and social effects of the inclosure policy upon the agricultural laborer class are strongly emphasized, and they are inclined to regard the whole phenomenon as having been productive of but little good. Their criticisms are directed mainly against the methods of inclosure actually followed, rather than against a rational administration of the principle. Inclosure bills were obtained without proper consideration of the wishes or interests, or even of the legal rights, of the villagers; and when the poor laborer wished to fence his meager allotment he was overwhelmed with excessive charges, and even robbed of the whole of his small property. Naturally the destruction of the laborers' common rights lessened their incomes, and the first generation of the ninteenth century was, for this class, a period of increasing hardship the rigors of which were accentuated by the widespread application of certain questionable principles of poor relief, and the administration of excessively strict laws with a barbaric severity. The culmination of a series of proposals and experiments at poor relief was the so-called "Speenhamland" system, which originated about 1795 in a parish of that name. The essential feature of this plan for relief, which was soon adopted generally, was the adjustment of wages to prices so that a minimum of real income would be assured. "When the gallon loaf shall cost 1s. 4d., then every poor and industrious man shall have 4s. weekly for his own, and Is. 1od. for the support of every other of his family" (p. 163). The plan provided, further, that if this minimum were not paid by the employer, it should be made up by the parish. Thus the Poor Law, "which had been the hospital, became the prison of the poor." They were farmed out, at low wages into the severest labor, while the overseers eked out to them the balance of a wretched and inadequate subsistence. With the collapse in the demand for England's farm products after the close of the great wars, the period of acute distress began. The parish now contained a "mass of laborers, all of them underpaid, whom the parish had to keep alive in the way most convenient to the farmers" (p. 174). The riots started in 1816, and the next fifteen years saw the enactment of a series of brutal laws which were mercilessly enforced against the helpless laborers. All sense of social unity and of social values seems to have been lost in the struggle, and the penalties inflicted for trifling acts were a heavy offset to any material gain which may have accrued from such a harsh policy. These oppressions brought about eventually the riots of 1830, the history of which is given with considerable fulness. The style of the book is extremely vivid and forceful. The sympathies of the authors are all too evidently on the side of the laborer, and in consequence there are, perhaps, too many heavy lines in the picture. Their brief against the upper classes of the time is a powerful one, and their indignation over the wrongs of the poor has produced some splendid passages of denunciation. The following brief extract from the concluding chapter is offered as a specimen, both of the style and of the point of view. Amid the great distress that followed Waterloo and peace, it was a commonplace of statesmen like Castlereagh and Canning that England was the only happy country in the world, and that so long as the monopoly of their little class was left untouched, her happiness would survive. That class has left bright and ample records of its life in literature, in art, in political traditions, in the display of great orations and debates, in the memories of brilliant conversations and sparkling wit; it has left dim and meagre records of the disinherited peasants that are the shadow of its wealth; of the exiled labourers that are the shadow of its pleasures; of the villages sinking in poverty and crime and shame that are the shadow of its power and its pride [p. 332]. OBERLIN COLLEGE H. L. LUTZ Il fenomeno della guerra e l'idea della pace. Di GIORGIO DEL VECCHIO, Prof. nella Università di Messina. Torino: Fratelli Bocca Editori, 1911. Pp. 99. L.3. The problem attacked in this brochure is whether, and to what extent, the ideal of universal peace may be constructed upon a legitimate rational basis. By an analysis of the causes of war, and its consequences good and evil, the author shows the historical support, or lack of it, which underlies the claims both of the advocates of peace and of those who magnify the importance and necessity of war. Since both good and evil result from this form of social conflict, it is seen that wholesale denunciation of war and its unqualified approval are both out of place. But while he admits the historical function of war the author declares that this does not warrant its absolute justification. Both its necessity and its value as a social factor are relative. There is no reason to suppose that it may not become less and less necessary as the forms of law are gradually extended over the field of social relations. The ideal of peace, he thinks, is perfectly rational. Having thus determined the rationality of the peace ideal, the author turns his attention to the theoretical conceptions underlying the modes of attaining it. Chief among these are the ascetic conception, exemplified in the early Christian philosophy; the imperialistic or absolutist conception, entertained, for instance, by Alexander; the empirico-political conception, according to which peace is to be established by mutual agreement among contemporaneous nations; and finally, the juridical conception, that is, the establishment of peace through the extension and maintenance of the forms of law. Each of these conceptions is critically examined, the last alone being accepted as sound. Juridically considered, the ideal of peace is identical with that of justice, and hence it must be progressively realized with the establishment of just relations among the nations of the world. The entire discussion is an interesting contribution to a question which is more and more engaging the attention of the statesmanship of the world. It fails to recognize sufficiently, however, that war itself is irrational and must necessarily be supplanted by other methods of social progress as the social consciousness and social intelligence are enlarged and developed. Progress in social intelligence means necessarily the growing perception that war is both wicked and foolish. Such intelligence is therefore the factor with which peace advocates should be concerned. With it the "peace of righteousness" could be established and maintained by intellectual methods, and the righteousness of peace be confirmed. I. W. HOWERTH Il socialismo guiridico con una ricca bibliografia sull'argomento. Di PROF. FRANCESCO COSENTINI, dell' "université nouvelle" di Bruxelles, direttore della "scienza sociale." Catania: Cav. Niccolò Giannotta, Editora, 1910. Pp. 130. L.3. There are three typical forms of socialism. First, there is the socialism of the Utopian reformers, men of vivid imagination who, impressed by the inequalities and injustices of society, undertook to construct imaginatively a social order from which these objectionable features would be eliminated. Hence has arisen the large mass of Utopian literature. Second, there is the socialism inspired by the spirit of revolt, which practices chiefly negative tactics and which promulgates a dogmatic social philosophy based chiefly upon abstract formulae. Such was the socialism of the early revolutionary philoso phers, and it is found today in the teachings of the extreme "left" in the Socialist parties of all countries. Finally, there is the socialism of constructivism which proceeds upon the theory that the Socialist Commonwealth is to be realized step by step through conscious political action, and which sees in every measure that strengthens the popular will and promotes the well-being of the masses an advance toward the Socialist goal. To this type of socialism there is a tendency in the Socialist parties of both Europe and America. It is manifested in the "revisionism" of Bernstein and his followers, in party tactics wherever governmental responsibilities have been assumed by the Socialists, and in the teachings of the more liberal Socialists everywhere. From this third type of socialism arises that particular form of it here called juridical. Juridical socialism is the socialism of law. It implies, and is fulfilled in, the socialization of legal procedure and legal institutions. Its history, fundamental principles, achievements, and prospects are set forth in this volume with clearness and vigor. The author concludes that in the great struggle for juridical reform socialism has played the most prominent part, and that it must be considered, not only as the greatest phenomenon of history, but also as the most powerful transformer of civilized life, and the noble herald of a genuinely humanitarian jurisprudence. I. W. HOWERTH Schuld und Sühne. Von F. W. FOERSTER. Munich: C. H. Beck'sche Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1911. This is a book divided into two parts which are difficult to regard as consistent. The first part is a philosophical defense of the doctrine that punishment (Strafe) means retribution or expiation (Vergeltung, Sühne); the rest of the book is a very careful and, in the main correct, account of the best American methods of reforming young delinquents. The author's professed intention is to reconcile two schools of penology, but it may well be doubted whether he has pleased either party. He certainly has not shown that the "Classical school" judges and legislatures can agree on any even approximate measure of "guilt" and "ill-desert"; and he has not even noticed the volume of facts adduced by F. H. Wines, S. J. Barrows, and others, to prove that justice in the old sense is not anything which can be formulated in quantities of pain or length of imprisonment. We forgive the speculative reactionary for his wanderings in the fog in the part devoted to mediaeval theology, for the sake of the really |